Nor is any hint of narratorial judgment passed on the commander who oversees the concentration camp where Victor is incarcerated during the Pinochet years. Victor starts an affair with 21-year-old Ofelia and gets her pregnant, fully aware of her conservative family and the inevitable outburst of violence that will ensue from her father, but there’s no authorial comment in sight. Allende’s style is impressively Olympian and the payoff is remarkable: a huge overview of generations, decades and countries.Īs we might expect of Allende, that omniscient voice is kind to all the characters, even when they do stupid or horrible things. Characters are a lot like gym weights it’s much easier to hug them close than it is to hold them further away. This kind of narration is extraordinarily difficult. An omniscient narrator sees into the minds not only of Victor and Roser, but of many people who brush past along the way, sometimes revisiting them, sometimes leaving them behind in the political riptides. Most of the story is told in episodic narration, or even summary.

Given that Allende has set herself the task of covering half a century in a relatively short book, it isn’t surprising that dialogue is minimal. Through that huge span, we follow Victor and his wife, Roser, as they flee across continents and witness the decades-long fallout from Franco’s rise to power. I sabel Allende’s 23rd book begins in the furnace of the Spanish civil war, where trainee doctor Victor Dalmau is holding a human heart between his hands, and ends more than 50 years later in a Chile recovering from the fall of Pinochet.

Summary of a long petal of the sea